Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#221

Post by MangoCoffee » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 9:49 AM UTC

marvin wrote: post #191

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wealth transfer scheme. Wealth is transferred from ordinary folk via the IPO-retirement-fund axis to the plethora of agents involved in the whole scheme, from the employees bashing out code and UX, right through to everyone involved the M&A and IPO and the whole tax / tax agent / government tax agency cadre. It's not trickledown . It's deluge-up economics.

Huh. That's a novel use of stupid index fund money. Just get your shitty investments listed on the stock exchange and cash out. Index fund buyers don't care, they'll swallow it right up and it's free to crash and burn at their expense. You could even do it deliberately, as long as it follows securities regulations. Being a pure momentum strategy, index investing has no intelligence. At one point this would make index…

Uber is not on S&P.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#222

Post by the-dude » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 9:51 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #190

squeaky-clean wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assuming typical restaurant margins I think Domino's margins blow typical restaurant margins out of the water. I don't have hard numbers, but worked a variety of delivery jobs from 2010-2014. Domino's was the only place with the attitude that their food was worth pennies to produce. Most places didn't offer discounts to their employees, not even for food that was mistakenly made and had to be trashed. Domino's was…

A cheap pizza from Aldi is £1. A regular pizza with some toppings and maybe meat is £2-3 in most supermarkets. Could be £4 in higher end supermarkets. You see where this is going. Pizzas are worth nothing, supermarkets are making money on these (it's not allowed to sell an item at a loss in Europe). Domino produces for £1-2 and sell for £10-20. The accepted number in the restaurant industry is that food cost must be…

> (it's not allowed to sell an item at a loss in Europe).

Do you have a source for this?

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#223

Post by maps7 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #116

csours wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone online saying how they didn't get their ranch with their pizza, so they called up customer service and eventually got a whole new pizza out of the deal. I understand it sucks to not get your ranch, but come on...

I mentioned this in a comment above, but I worked at Domino's and this was 100% encouraged. My manager hammered it into my head that a mistake was just an opportunity to gain a more loyal customer. If someone called with a complaint, we would credit you for a whole new pizza. Drink and dessert too if we really F'd up. The reason being people will actually stop ordering Domino's if they're upset at a mistake in an ord…

It makes sense. I would definitely order again and again from a place that gave me assurances that they would handle any mistakes.

I got an Indian meal delivered without the rice I ordered. I rang up and they apologized and refunded me straight away... but I still didn't have the rice so the meal I intended on having was ruined. I probably will never order from them again (there's plenty of other Indian food places near me)

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#224

Post by marvin » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

erispoe wrote: post #205

marvin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. That's a novel use of stupid index fund money. Just get your shitty investments listed on the stock exchange and cash out. Index fund buyers don't care, they'll swallow it right up and it's free to crash and burn at their expense. You could even do it deliberately, as long as it follows securities regulations. Being a pure momentum strategy, index investing has no intelligence. At one point this would make index…

Uber is not in the S&P500. And no fund manager is consistently doing better than the market. "Stupid index fund money" looks pretty smart in that regard.

It's false that no fund manager is consistently beating the market; you can easily find actively managed funds that have beaten the market for the last 5 years. The big debate is whether this is due to luck or skill, whether it's possible to tell the difference and whether it's possible to determine which fund manager will be successful in the future.

Uber is part of some indexes; S&P500 isn't the only one. The efficient markets hypothesis is obviously false, although from a distance it's usually a decent approximation.

And in case I'm about to get downvoted for violating the consensus -- 100% of my long-term investments are currently in index funds. But with the growing share of indexed investments, this is a very interesting question.

There are currently trillions of dollars (and growing) following the simple momentum strategy that index funds represent. It almost beggars belief that this is not, and will never, be exploited for gain.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#225

Post by marvin » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:02 AM UTC

MangoCoffee wrote: post #221

marvin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. That's a novel use of stupid index fund money. Just get your shitty investments listed on the stock exchange and cash out. Index fund buyers don't care, they'll swallow it right up and it's free to crash and burn at their expense. You could even do it deliberately, as long as it follows securities regulations. Being a pure momentum strategy, index investing has no intelligence. At one point this would make index…

Uber is not on S&P. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

Well, they're in the Russell 1000 and others, not to mention a bunch of ETFs that are basically indexes of their own. If you want a properly diversified global index fund portfolio, you wouldn't want to limit yourself to 500 of the largest American companies.

Mine contains 4 funds covering ~2500 global companies.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#226

Post by hddherman » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:16 AM UTC

atupis wrote: post #108

cletus wrote: post #38

What I find interesting about the food delivery business is that there's clearly a market for this but nobody's happy. - Restaurants (rightly) complain that the drivers provide a poor service. For example, pizza delivered cold because the drivers have no heat bags. I've even heard of a pizza box mounted vertically on a delivery bicycle. - Customers are unhappy because food can be delivered cold through no fault of th…

Self-driving vechicles something like https://www.starship.xyz/ but food delivery would be killer.

That's not a good example to bring up, especially if you take into account the recent layoffs and their current operations.

In Estonia they still seem to be doing a sort of a limited trial where they only deliver to a small area of one part of the town. The robots are too slow and get ignored by traffic all the time since their programming is very conservative. They try to avoid accidents but at the cost of delivery times.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#227

Post by tbdenney » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:23 AM UTC

chejazi wrote: post #36

tyre wrote: post #24

Food delivery is a terrible business. M&A won’t make it better. I worked at LivingSocial in 2012/2013. We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.” Takeout and Delivery was one of the last bets the company made. Basically food delivery. The customer service load is huge, the services aren’t really differentiated, and you have to both pay the driver enough for it to be worth it an…

Maybe ghost kitchens will fix the unit economics.

Kinda surprised this isn't higher up, I also assumed the path to a more sustainable model is to have a set of ghost kitchens making food of different types exclusively serving Deliveroo/Glovo/UberEats customers.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#228

Post by newsclues » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:25 AM UTC

maps7 wrote: post #218

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wealth transfer scheme. Wealth is transferred from ordinary folk via the IPO-retirement-fund axis to the plethora of agents involved in the whole scheme, from the employees bashing out code and UX, right through to everyone involved the M&A and IPO and the whole tax / tax agent / government tax agency cadre. It's not trickledown . It's deluge-up economics.

Is retirement fund money really being put into Uber?

I think CALPERS invested in Uber

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#229

Post by londons_explore » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

Talanes wrote: post #211

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driver needs to wait for the second meal to be prepared, That's the rub right there. If you're the winner in the market, can send info to a restaurant to keep your food hot (or even hotter than normal) and can schedule it perfectly it will work. Once you spend a couple of billions into the infrastructure to make it happen, you can totally make a couple of hundred thousands worth of profit - 2020 Startups.

>send info to a restaurant to keep your food hot I'm not sure what exactly you think restaurants can do with that request. A small subset of places will have a heat lamp, but that still doesn't really preserve quality, just heat.

"This food will be ready to collect at 17:35 and 45 seconds, and if it isn't, we wont be paying you".

Restaurants would soon figure out how to use a couple of timers to get every order done on time.

There could also be a deeper integration to ensure that, for example, there are no more than 3 orders worth of fries being cooked at once, or no more than 2 pickups per minute scheduled, to avoid overloading that part of the kitchen.

Re: Uber, Postmates Agree on $2.65B All-Stock Deal

#230

Post by nudgeee » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:50 AM UTC

wittekm wrote: post #155

jameslk wrote: post #139

I am awaiting a Steve Jobs-like re-entry of Travis Kalanick back into Uber when Uber purchases CloudKitchens to complete its kitchen-to-door vertical integration. It's all very hypothetical, but I give it a 1% chance of happening.

Uber is doing fine without that garbage human.

Sure Travis has flaws and has slipped up a number of times, but his heart is generally in the right place. Here’s a fantastic insight into his character: https://youtu.be/9VIlkPeY9Rk (2017)